Background
When opened in a particular PDF viewer, your exported PDF might show spiky, extended strokes that otherwise look fine in GoodNotes or another PDF viewer. In some cases, some dots or decimals are missing.
Solution
At current, it is not clear as to the exact cause of this issue, due to the sporadic nature of the problem. This varies from PDF viewer to PDF viewer. For example, we see that this issue occurs to Chrome, but not in iPhone/iPad PDF Viewer, Mac Preview, or Adobe Reader. It's likely an issue with iOS PDF engine, which GoodNotes uses. Unfortunately, this means we can only hope for a fix by Apple itself.
Whilst this is an ongoing issue (that we are actively investigating), there are a few things that can be done to resolve this:
- When exporting your PDF, set the 'PDF Data Format' to 'Editable' before exporting. Whilst this may make your PDF slightly larger, this will resolve the above issue.
- Alternatively, you can export your document in an image format. The advantage to this is that you would maintain the document exactly as it shows on your GoodNotes 5 app. If you are exporting multiple pages, you can use online tools to merge them back to a single PDF.
- You can open the PDF on a different PDF Viewer, as at current this issue only affects certain PDF viewers.